The invention of cement and concrete is an outstanding achievement of mankind that enabled the construction of industrial housing, engineering facilities, and transport highways around the planet. Today, almost everything is built with the help of Portland cement: the annual production exceeded 3 billion tons for cement and over 10 billion tons for concrete, and it continues to grow rapidly: concrete dams and roadways, piers and airfields, bridges and stadiums, TV towers and skyscrapers, billions meters of housing per year.
Dozens of new enterprises in China, India, Latin America and other developing countries are annually added to thousands of existing cement plants.
The world cement industry is developing in the following directions:                Reducing the fuel cost and CO2 emissions in the air,        Improving the construction and technical properties of Portland cement.        
Most cement enterprises in the world work using the dry process with preliminary decarbonization. However, when producing such large volume of cement, even the advanced technology requires burning over 300 million tons of fuel annually accompanied by emission of significant amounts of CO2 attaining about 850 kg per ton of clinker and reaching nearly 2.5 billion tons annually, or over 50 billion cubic meters as a gas.
Improving the construction and technical properties of Portland cement has stopped, and recent decades are marked by poor progress in improvement of their strength remaining at the level of 42.5-52.5. Today, cement plants produce almost the same product all over the world, the quality of which is dependent on class or grade, including a set of requirements for construction and technical properties; the main characteristic is the compressive and bending strength of tested concrete samples having hardened for 28 days with variations in curing period.
Yet, all over the world enterprises pass to higher grade concretes. New concrete was termed in the world building as High Performance Concrete (HPC). Construction and technical properties of such concretes significantly expanded the possibilities for builders in the construction of skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, dams, mines and underwater structures, while the production of concrete with high and ultra-high performance characteristics led to the development of modified concrete mixtures: optimization of compositions, stricter requirements to quality of fillers, use of expensive chemical additives and microsilica.
The challenge of today's cement industry, for instance, in Russia is a very high cost of production due to the significant consumption of fuel and electricity per ton of cement. The average specific fuel consumption per ton of clinker in Russia in 2011 is among the highest in the world—198.2 kg, power consumption per ton of cement is 117 kW/h, when adding 8.3% of mineral supplements on average, and the average cost per ton of the product attained 2,600 rubles in 2011, excluding VAT and shipping costs. The share of energy-efficient dry process at cement plants in Russia rose to 20.3% by 2011. Yet, it is not high enough to compete successfully with foreign suppliers, who have worked with the dry process for a long time and used up to 30-35 wt % of power-saving mineral supplements.
The second problem many cement enterprises face a poor quality of produced cement due to the fact that plants—under deterioration of production equipment and poor state of raw materials quarries—are aimed at saving resources such as fuel that causes incomplete burning of both clinker and electricity, low fineness and thus poor quality of delivered cement (250-300 m2/kg in Russia instead of the world's 350-450 m2/kg). In Russia, the volume of energy-saving mineral additives added to cement under grinding does not increase and even decreases continuously: from 10.6% in 2007 to 8.3% in 2011. This is due to two factors: the first one is the need for transportation and drying of mineral additives (slag and ash), and the second one is too small penalties introduced by the Russian Government for those who produce hundreds of millions tons of slag and ash waste annually: steel plants and CHPPs continue covering hundreds of thousands hectares of land around with waste (the volume of slag and ash dumps in Russia has exceeded 80 billion tons).
The third key problem of the Russian cement industry is the need for growth in cement production.
According to the national development plan adopted by the Government of Russia last year, the approved STRATEGY 2020 is expected to increase the annual cement production from current 55.9 million tons to 97.2 million tons in 2020. Hence, to meet the approved plans for the construction of housing and roads in Russia, it is necessary to increase the cement production volume by 5 million tons every year. And this is needed under circumstances when raw material quarries of many existing plants are exhausted, equipment is deteriorated, and the construction of new cement plants requires the investment of 250-300 USD on average per newly produced ton of cement.
Fine grinding of cement with various inorganic and polymeric additives is interesting for many researches. There is a considerable number of technical solutions, similar to this statement, which imply the increase in surface of cement grains and mineral fillers to intensify their interaction with water serving as the reaction medium. However, all known solutions face a dramatic increase in water consumption of fine-ground materials that causes a lot of adverse events leading to the degradation of construction, technical and operational properties of such cement compositions with mineral and polymer additives.
There is also a method of manufacturing the low-water binding material having two stages: the first stage is grinding the initial mixture of Portland cement clinker, gypsum and a portion of mineral additive to a specific surface area of 250-350 m2/kg, while the second stage is additional grinding of the resulting material with plasticizer, setting retarders and remaining mineral additive to a specific surface area of 450-600 m2/kg (see, for instance, Invention Certificate of the USSR No. 1 658 584, cl. C 04 B 7/52, 1988). This method makes it possible to reduce the energy consumption during grinding the binding material while maintaining its strength. Yet, the complexity of two-stage grinding and multicomponent composition of cement do not provide the consistent product quality by analog.
The prototype of the proposed method is a technique related to the production of cement with a mineral additive involving grinding to a specific surface of 400-600 m2/kg of a mixture comprising Portland cement clinker, gypsum, superplasticizer S-3 and siliceous mineral supplement taken in an amount of 5-28 wt % of said components, followed by the addition of silica additive in an amount of 30-70% of cement weight, and final grinding of the mixture to a specific surface of 300-390 m2/kg.
In this case, fine quartz sand, silica clay, blast furnace slag, and CHPP ash are used as siliceous additives. The disadvantage of this method is the need to implement a two-stage cement grinding and a relatively low bending strength of cement stone with a specific surface area of 300-390 m2/kg.
To date, variable compositions of fine cements, including low-water binding materials, have not found any widespread use in the cement industry in Russia and other countries. Both foreign and Russian researchers are making attempts to get more active cements for high-strength concrete.
For instance, there is a hyperfine composition of Nanodur CEM II/B-S 52.2 R cement developed by Dyckerhoff (Germany) and obtained from Portland cement clinker and granulated blast furnace slag without adding microsilica. This is high-quality cement with special properties that meets the requirements for strength generation and resistance to aggressive environments. Yet, this cement requires significant expenditures (over 600 kg per cubic meter of concrete) and special additives to obtain concrete.
There are also compositions of cements and low-water binding materials developed in Russia and comprising finely ground Portland cement clinker, calcium sulfate varieties, mineral and polymer additives.
The prototype of the claimed cement composition is a composition comprising Portland cement clinker (9-97 wt %), calcium sulphate varieties (2-7 wt %), organic dewatering agent (0.085-4.0 wt %), active mineral additives and/or fillers in an amount of 5-65% of cement weight, and hardening accelerator at the cement/accelerator ratio from 1000:1 to 100:1 ground to a specific surface of 400-700 m2/kg. In this case, Portland cement clinker contains particles of four fractions with the following sizes: fraction I—from 0.05 to 10.0 μm in an amount of 15.3-34.3 wt %; fraction II—from 10.01 to 30.0 μm in an amount of 37.2-77.4 wt %; fraction III—from 30.01 to 80.00 μm in an amount of 4.4-19.6 wt %; and fraction IV—over 80 μm in an amount of 0.1-4.8 wt %. Gypsum contains particles of one fraction ranging in size from 0.5 to 15 μm depleted in organic dewatering agent, while organic dewatering agent occurs in these cement fractions in the following amount: in fraction I—from 0.045 to 1.7 wt %, in fraction II—from 0.02 to 2.10 wt %, and in fraction III—from 0.01 to 0.2 wt %. Furthermore, dewatering agent is present as a separate fraction with a particle size of 0.3-20.0 μm in an amount of 0.01-0.2 wt %.
The analysis of the cement particle size distribution is indicative of the fact that it is not practicable in terms of cement production due to lack of capacity to regulate the particle size when grinding cement clinker in the declared range; the protected distribution of dewatering agents on cement particles and in a free form in all kinds of existing industrial grinding equipment is also hardly possible. To date, no cement plant has produced such cements.